Archive for November, 2012

Recently, I came across a few interesting publishing tools: ShareLaTeX allows you to collaboratively edit LaTeX documents: https://www.sharelatex.com
Anthologize is aWordPress plugin with which you can export the content of a WordPress blog as an eBook: http://anthologize.org
Docverter is an open source server software that allows you to convert markup formats such as HTML, Markdown or LaTeX into print publishing formats like PDF or EPUB: http://www.docverter.com, source code: https://github.com/docverter/docverter These tools should be very interesting to those who produce online content and would like to ...

Lately, I've been doing a lot of work for a customer involving deployment and configuration of applications on IBM WebSphere Application Server. While I really dislike being the grumpy developer I just have to say that WebSphere Application Server - at least till version 6, which is the one I'm working on - sucks beyond measure. I can hardly think of any piece of software as ill-conceived, convoluted and error-prone as this one.
Usually, Java applications live up to SUN's "Write once, run anywhere" claim but not so with IBM ...

Twoice is a prototype of a 'Twitter for voice messages' app built with Grails 1.3.6 (http://grails.org) and some HTML5 and Comet for the UI. It's a nice idea, which has been lingering on my hard disk far too long so I've now released it under the MIT license:
https://github.com/BjoernKW/Twoice

Topicalizer is a suite of text analysis and information extraction tools developed by me.
It used to be available under http://www.topicalizer.com. However, I unfortunately don't have any time any more to properly maintain it, which is why I'm open-sourcing the code for others to learn from and build upon:
https://github.com/BjoernKW/Topicalizer

When answering a question on Quora yesterday I stated that although Google's self-driving cars are a pretty neat idea they are by no means a solution to the commuting problem: People waste countless hours every year while commuting to their workplace.
Though self-driving cars might alleviate this they won't solve the root problem: Transporting people to their workplaces when there's technology available that would allow them to work remotely or in fact from any place they'd like to is just wrong. Remote working technology ...

I somehow dislike the concept of New Year's resolutions since a new year is just as good a time for trying to change something or venturing into something new as any other time. New Year's resolutions also tend to be forgotten ever so quickly.
It just so happens that I've been nurturing a few thoughts as of lately that I'd like to turn into something real right now.
My point is that the way software development work (or any engineering / technical / ...

Today, MG Siegler ranted about as to why native mobile app development is better than developing HTML5 web apps. I strongly disagree with his point of view. Besides technical reasons, the question if to develop a native (say iOS) or HTML5 app is much more about culture, speed and agility of development. Sure, native apps will provide a richer experience at the first glimpse but there isn't really all that much you can't do with HTML5 nowadays.
The really important point, however ...

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